Up to twenty percent of working musicians get struck by focal dystonia at some point. So do writers, athletes, craftspeople … an estimated 300,000 North Americans. The underlying problem? Normal brain plasticity gone rogue.

An estimated ten percent of Canadians struggle with depression, flashbacks and panic attacks associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). So do 14,000 Canadian veterans. Locked brain circuits may be to blame.

Picture a landscape buried beneath a sky-high heap of dead plants and animal corpses. This is what Earth’s surface would look like if it weren’t for fungi. Fungi are the biosphere’s recyclers. Human society depends on them absolutely.

Rosie Redfield spat in a tube and mailed it to a Mountain View, California outfit called 23andMe. A month later, the University of British Columbia geneticist and MOOC instructor received the results by email.

Debron, Luke and Paula huddle around a laptop in a McGill University cafeteria, absorbed in an online game. No dreadful monsters, zombies or bloody explosions here. Phylo is much more serious than that.

There’s hardly a facet of drug action that isn’t determined in some way by our DNA — by our genome. On a recent trip to Vancouver, I visited the offices and labs of the Canadian Pharmacogenomics Network for Drug Safety.